Pizza is an extremely popular food since it is tasty, convenient, and easy to prepare. Frozen pizzas can be purchased and can be conveniently reheated at home in a short period of time before consumption. While frozen pizzas continue to be an extremely popular food, they have encountered substantial consumer resistance since they do not compare favorably to pizzeria pizzas or those made at home from basic ingredients such as flour, water, tomato sauce, and meat. In other words frozen pizzas are often purchased for convenience rather than flavor.
Consumer resistance to prepared frozen pizzas is commonly directed to the quality of the shell or crust after baking. Initially, pizza shells or crusts comprised generally circular sections of dough that were prebaked at the factory, topped with pizza toppings, quick frozen and stored until sale. Upon reheating, consumers found that these prebaked shells would not become crisp during baking, or tended to be tough, hard, brittle and cracker-like after baking. In the face of such substantial consumer resistance, many pizza manufacturers developed pizza shells or crusts that were fried in oil prior to the application of pizza topping. Fried pizza crusts have solved many consumer and production related problems, but the fried crusts still possess drawbacks.
In our research, we have found that by frying pizza shaped dough sections, large delaminated areas can appear where the pizza crust separates into two layers separated by a large space. Further, we have found that large non-delaminated areas can also remain in the pizza crust in which no separation at all occurs. The large delaminated areas that form during frying can often be overcooked, can become extremely crispy and can have substantial size. The large non-delaminated areas can absorb substantial amounts of oil, can be undercooked, and can become soggy. We have identified the inability to control the distribution and size of the delaminated and non-delaminated areas as the reason the fried crusts can be disagreeable to certain consumers. Clearly a need exists to improve the taste and texture of pizza crusts by controlling the distribution and extent of delamination.
We have found that by forming dough with a certain embossed pattern or footprint compressed into the dough the size, shape and distribution of the delaminated and nondelaminated zones can be very closely controlled. The control of the delamination results in the associated control of cooking extent, fat content from the frying step, taste, and mouth feel.